Oedipal God: The Chinese Nezha and His Indian Origins by Meir Shahar (review)

the Divyāvadāna forming the Sanskrit legend of King Aśoka, of a version of which T. 2043 is a translation. In the Sanskrit text, however, what Aśoka is made to ingest is onion (Skt. palāṇḍu), not garlic (Divy., ed. Cowell and Neil, 1886, 409, ll. 19–22), and this is also what the earlier Chinese translation conveys (cong 蔥, cf. T 50 no. 2042, 108c15–18). There are several possible explanations for this discrepancy in T. 2043—variant reading in the source, local adaptation, sheer mistake—but none of them would be even conceivable without so much as a peek to the other side. Briefly, while the opportunities to gauge Chinese against Indic texts may be few and problematic, this seems no reason to neglect them altogether with an exclusive focus on the “target context”—not in a study that has translation so emphatically in its foreground. However, anyone ignoring the book on this ground would do so at their peril. Those fastidiously working on Chinese Buddhist translations, in particular , will find a lot to learn and ponder here. For while they nearly invariably stick to the upstream end of the process, this monograph finally addresses seriously, and systematically as far as it gets, the entire pragmatics of Buddhist translations, their implied uses and readers, in a perspective that changes the game dramatically. If only Salguero’s thinking could go into the work of the likes of Seishi Karashima, Jan Nattier, Stefano Zacchetti, and many more, surely it would be the best of both worlds. ANTONELLO PALUMBO SOAS, University of London MEIR SHAHAR, Oedipal God: The Chinese Nezha and His Indian Origins. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. xvi, 256 pp. US$54 (hb). ISBN 978-0-82484760 -9 Nezha 哪吒, the Buddhist guardian god Vaiśravaṇa’s third son, was a preternaturally strong child who, in a fit of boyish mischief, killed a dragon king’s heir. Vaiśravaṇa blamed his son for this crime and his wife for bearing such a monster, creating a classical oedipal triangle. Eventually, Nezha committed suicide to atone for his act, after which his disembodied soul, having been reborn in a new body, convinced his mother to build a temple for him. When Vaiśravaṇa discovered this temple, he whipped Nezha’s statue, and Nezha vowed to kill his father. The conflict reached a stalemate after Vaiśravaṇa received a pagoda with which to control his murderous son. Like Ji Gong 濟公, the subject of Meir Shahar’s 1998 book Crazy Ji, the patricidal child-god Nezha is in many ways a transgressive figure whose violations of social norms threaten the power structure and push his cult toward the margins.1 Yet Shahar illustrates why Nezha deserves our attention in the innovative Oedipal God, which follows Nezha from India to China and, in a more radical cross-cultural move, uses Freudian psychoanalysis to make sense of the god’s myths and worship. Oedipal God’s innovations are apparent first in the book’s bipartite structure: Part 1 (chapters 1–4) considers whether the Freudian oedipal complex applies to 1 Meir Shahar, Crazy Ji: Chinese Religion and Popular Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1998). 204 BOOK REVIEWS Chinese culture; part 2 (chapters 5–9) examines Indian esoteric Buddhism’s effects on the Chinese imagination of the divine. Part 1 answers its central question of Freud’s applicability in the affirmative based on analyses of Nezha’s legend in different versions and genres as well as the god’s worship in contemporary Taiwan. Shahar’s understanding of the oedipal complex is not limited to a son’s desire to kill his father and have sex with his mother; instead, he draws on Freud’s broader sense of “family complex” that encompasses any intrafamilial intergenerational conflict stemming from taboo sexual desire. This analysis also follows the conclusions in Johnson and Price-Williams’s Oedipus Ubiquitous that oedipal themes, while crosscultural , also manifest in culturally specific ways.2 For example, oedipal tales in China and India tend to involve fathers directing violence toward sons rather than the reverse. The first four chapters locate Nezha’s legend within...